A long line of veterans and family members wait to go below deck on the LST 325 Thursday morning.

Vernon Fulton, retired from the Navy, gives his granddaughter, Cassandra Waters, an Army reservist, a hug during the LST Veterans Day breakfast Thursday morning.

Left to right, the Brown twins, Don and Ron, are retired carpenters who joined the Air Force in the 1960s after graduating from Reitz High School. They mingled aboard the LST 325 Thursday morning with other veterans attending the annual LST Veterans Day breakfast.

EVANSVILLE - Ronald Moore, a Vietnam-era Marine, brought his grandkids to the LST 325 at 7 a.m. Thursday, and not just for the ship's free breakfast, although Lydia and Alex Lenfers, who are 8 and 10, were looking forward to pancakes.

"Young people today don't know much about Veterans Day and I just wanted to (familiarize) them," he said, quietly mentioning veterans "deserve respect," which his generation in the military didn't always receive.

Within minutes, the two Daniel Wertz students were on the deck of the World War II-era ship at Marina Point — waiting to go below with hundreds of veterans, some old enough to have served in World War II, others young enough to have just missed being sent to Iraq.

Cassandra Waters, with the 380th Quartermaster Battalion of the U.S. Army Reserve in Evansville, didn't enlist until 2007, after the 380th returned from Iraq.

She showed up with her grandfather, Vernon Fulton, a machinist mate with the Navy from 1958 to 1962.

Waters said the event — which draws more than 600 people and is annually sponsored by Browning Funeral Home where she's an after-care adviser helping bereaved families understand benefits — "is wonderful. All these veterans come to share stories, maybe reconnect with someone they haven't seen in years."

It was her grandfather's first time onboard a ship that saw action at D-Day, even though LST 325 has been moored in Evansville since 2005: "I spent four years at sea, so I was in no hurry to get down here (the LST 325)," Fulton quipped. "I was on light to heavy cruisers, this is pretty confined."

Another Navy veteran, Philip Foltz, said he found out this week the two ships he served on "were cut up for scrap metal, so I guess this (325) is my ship now."

Retired Bosse High School teacher Bob Rogers actually rode the LST 325 once "for about two hours in New York harbor." That was in 1945, but he wound up not having to go overseas because the war was coming to a close.

Rogers had Pearl Harbor on his mind this Veterans Day because he and his wife, Carol, saw the Arizona Memorial while visiting Hawaii last month. "It will bring tears to your eyes," Rogers said of the memorial to the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the United States fleet.

On that day 69 years ago Rogers was 15 and having Sunday dinner with his family in Brooklyn, N.Y., when radio flashed the news. He recalled, "We all looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my god, the rumor was correct.' We knew our lives were going to change."

His mother, while working with a New York committee collecting firearms for England, had heard rumors of a possible attack on Hawaii.

Two of the more popular veterans on lower deck Thursday morning seemed to be the "Brown twins," Ron and Don, a pair of lanky retired carpenters.

They joined the Air Force in 1965 after graduating from Reitz High School and wound up in Southeast Asia. Don flew some B-52 missions and Ron was a jet engine mechanic on B-52s in Thailand.

Today, they're active in VFW Post 1114 and fire rifles as part of a color guard at more than 200 burials each year of area veterans.